Fish Wrap: Striped bass fishing on a serious decline

Mike Evert bought his fiberglass fishing rod from Loch Lomond Bait Shop more than 30 years ago. The 6-foot-8 stick remains in shipshape, even after thousands of fish caught — including a 110-pound sturgeon caught and released in 1998.

But now, the old rod doesn't bend like it used to. That's not any fault of its own, though. Rather, the fishing in San Francisco Bay has all but died. Evert, a Novato resident, says he hasn't seen such a slow summer in his decades of fishing experience on the bay.

Most concerning to Evert is the state of the striped bass. This season, he hasn't caught a single one. Indeed, he believes we are witnessing a species in dramatic decline, from glory days 40 years ago when limits of 15-pound fish was a routine summertime event to now, when the average striped bass is a 3-pound, 20-inch fish.

"Right now is a key time," Evert said. "The stripers should be in the bay going up to the Delta. They should be passing through the Brothers Islands and holding there, but this year there have been no fish."

Well, there have been a few striped bass caught in scattered flurries of action around the bay and, more recently, the Delta. Keith Fraser at Loch Lomond Bait Shop says the action just picked up after a long and lonely summer.

"We went months without seeing a striped bass," Fraser said. "We regularly have slow periods, but this was the most pronounced it's ever been."

Fraser notes that a few anglers trolling lures along the Marin shoreline have caught and released 50 fish or more in a day. The trouble is, they're tiny — mostly less than the minimum 18-inch size limit.

Jay Sorenson, a veteran Bay Area angler who lives in Stockton, remembers in the 1970s when one could expect to catch multiple 20- to 30-pound stripers in a few hours' fishing.

"Today, if you get a limit of fish 22 and 24 inches (about 4 to 6 pounds), you've had a good day," he said.

Sorenson — also the founder or the California Striped Bass Association — has fished in bay-delta waters since 1945 and has watched a precipitous crash in fish numbers which began in about 1970. He attributes the decline to the concurrent acceleration of pumping from the state and federal water pumps in the delta, which send water to farms and cities south of Stockton.

In 2013, for the first time in his adult life, Sorenson did not bother buying a fishing license.

Most fishermen seem aligned in blaming the development of water projects in the delta as the cause of fisheries deterioration. But many are likewise frustrated with their own brethren who choose to keep large striped bass for eating, in spite of the fact that the breeding population seems to be dwindling away.

Dave Hurley, writer of the popular subscriber fishing update "The Hotsheet", regularly receives reports from fishermen of recent catches. About a week ago, he says, a fisherman in the Delta participating in a fishing derby caught and kept a 52-, a 42-, and a 28-pound striped bass over three days.

"At one time it was perfectly acceptable to have these catch-and-kill derbies for big fish," Hurley said. "Now, we can't do that anymore. I wish more fishermen would ask themselves, 'Do I really need to keep this fish, or should I let it go?'"

According to data collected by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, striped bass abundance has plummeted since the 1960s. The annual fall midwater trawl survey, which scoops up a small number of bay fishes from the same sites on the same day year after year, counted 19,677 juvenile stripers in 1967. A steady decline followed. In 2010, the survey produced just 43 striped bass. 2011 and 2012's surveys found 272 and 125 baby stripers in the net, respectively.

Evert, his eyes on the future of fishing, says he will keep no more large striped bass if he does catch any, this year or in the coming seasons.